Great Story From Dublin’s Hogan Museum!

Anyone who hosts a museum gets accustomed to questions – some we can answer and some we cannot — but sometimes we overlook the most obvious.

At the Hogan Museum on recently, I talked to a father-son duo who was visiting from the metroplex. They were very interested in the contents of Mrs. Hogan’s scrapbooks which were given to us by her family. Along with the newspaper clipping from the months when Mr. Hogan was hospitalized in El Paso following a near-fatal bus-car crash were about 150 telegrams from fellow golfers, sports writers, movie stars and friends from around the world.

Our visitors were very interested in the telegrams and the father was explaining who the people were who had sent them: Leo Durocher, Dennis O’Keefe, Blackie Sherrod, Grantland Rice, Jimmy Demeret and others…..but then he looked at his son and said, “Son, you do know what a telegram is, right?” The son laughed and said, “well, kind of…” but then acknowledged that he really wasn’t sure what the process was. And he admitted he had probably never really seen one.

Telegrams were such a part of communications in “the olden days”…they delivered good news and bad news in a few stark words. They were a little bit like today’s text messages or tweets – just a whole lot slower and without the emoticons. But it was fun to realize that it wasn’t just the contents or the signers of the telegrams that were interesting to the visitors – it was the telegram itself.

All in all, another great day at the Hogan Museum with visitors from throughout the state—most of them especially interested in the famous 1-iron picture from the U.S. Open in Merion – an event which dominated sports TV that very day. So much of the television coverage of this year’s U.S. Open featured the Hogan story, still considered by many to be the greatest comeback in sports history.
If you don’t know about the Hogan comeback, drop by the Hogan Museum.

It’s an amazing story and it will make you proud of our hometown hero.